cost White workers their jobs. If he ean llssure their jobs it may well be thllt he will ensure their votes at the SlIme time.
In the meantime the effect of this policy on industry and the non·White worker can well be imagined. What .security wiJI there be for the industrialist? None at all. He may have to face job-reservation and its consequent dislocation of his business al any moment. Already overseas industries hesitate to establish factones iD the Union. How much more hesitant wiJI they be now? They will go elsewhere.
There will be no such easy way out for the non·White worker. Whate\'er his talent and his skill he can be faced with a blank wall of legislative prohibition at any point at which the minister chooses to put it and al any time. The: past operation of the industrial colour bar in South Africa has been bad enough. We are now seeing how much worse it may soon become.
Mr. de Klerk will enjoy the dubious right of being able to introduce determinations which will make it possible for him to send a man. who has spent a lifetime improving his status and competence in the job he has chosen, back to the job in which he started as a small boy.
Time has turned the old reseo'CS into a liability, in a modem agricultural community geared to the demands of the times. Minister de Klerk is busy turning secondary industry, perhaps the country's most worthwhile achievement in the last twenty years, into a rickety structure which will be an object of ridicule to the rest of the industrial world. In doing so he will set back industrial development drastically, store up for the future a fund of ill-will and frustration terrifying to contemplate and, ironically enough, he may well throw out of their jobs the very people he is trying to protect. If there are no factories it won't only be non-
Europeans who will be looking for jobs.
Last month we said "In a crazy world the Nationalist Party stands out as a ridiculous anachronism". How right we were!
The Johannsburg Municipal Elections
by Marioa FrkdmaDll
"A SAFE LIBERAL SEAT", remarked my spouse, "is a seat where • liberal doesn't lose his deposit.l.' And even such seats are not common, it seemed, aOer an election where the Liberal Party lost fh-e out of se\'en deposits, although one was lost by a minute martin in a 67-plus
y.
poll. Polls were prodigiously high all round.What brought all these: people to the polls? Is it possible to deduce wh:lt the voters were voting for-or against? In any situation abounding in variables like this one, one cannot draw conelusions: one can only speculate and give expression to one's own experience. For what they're worth. then, I'd like 10 ffi:lke some observations. I must emphasize that I am expressing purely personal viewpoints.
In the first place I should like to s:ty that the atmosphere in which the elections took place was that of a General Election. For this the Press, especially the morning Press, was responsible. The large polls and the high V.P. vote resulted, I think, from two motives among voters. The firsl was a desire to show the Nats. that Johannesburg is againstlhem by registering a sort of vote of confidence in the largest Opposition group. The second motive was induced in the e1ectorale directly by the Press which said in so many words: "If you vote for the Liberals now, you will encourage them 10 fight more seats in the General Election and thus hindcr the V.P.'s efforts to gct the Nats. out". My guess is that this was the "Iinc" most effective against us. What I am of course saying is that the large vote for the U.P. was less a vote against us than it was a vote against the Nats. The overwhelming majority of voters were 1/or expressing their views on the United Party's civie administration.
About 3,100 voters voted Liberal, I,BOO-plus of them voting in three wards. Were they votingfor the Liberal Party programme or were they just disgruntled citizens? My view, and
it is based on the reception I got canvassing six times a week, is that a very large number of them were voting for the Liberal Party's solution to national problems. I have canvassed in every election the liberal Party has fought in the Transvaal since its inception and I really am impressed with the increased sympathy for tbe liberal Party's case which the electorate now shows. A high proportion of the electorate now accepts that there have to be major changes in S.A.'s social, political and economic structure and, notwithstanding a really deep desire to see the Nats. go, there is a fairly widespread acknowledgement that neither the V.P. nor the Nat. party has any answer to S.A.'s real problems. This admission was made, I ought to add, by many people who expressed their intention to vote U.P.: they would not abandon the U.P.
just before a General Election and many of them have not given up hope that the V.P. in
powe~ would embark on an extension of rights to non-Whites. ([ncidentally, the number of V.P. supporters who don't know what the V.P. is offering-or, rather, not offering-the non- Whites is enormous!) Other people voted for us in the hope that there would be some opposi- tion in the City Council: whether these people stood firm against General Election fervour is anybody's guess.
Lessons to be learnt? There are two, I think. One is that, even at present worker-strength, the Transvaal should have fought four seats and not seven. We must canvass the whole ward, not half or less than half as in this election. The other is more important. General Election fever militated against us in October; by the time the real General Election comes along, it will reach epidemic proportions and a large number of those who stood firm in October will not be able to withstand its contagion. Reason and realism will be early victims in theepidemic.
The anti-Republican "referendum" virus ("vote V.P. to record opposition to a Republic") will take its toll of our supporters too. It will not help us to point out that the Liberal Party, unlike the U.P., is unequivocally opposed to Nat. ideology, chapter and ve~. Almost an the anti-Nat. support going will go to the only party big enough to oust the Nats. even though that Party has failed miserably to take either a morally worthwhile or a realistic stand on S.A.'s problems.
One tbing I must concede to those whose assessment differs from mine: the General Election-"slant" given to the municipal elections did not, on the figures in my ward at any rate, seem to cause much "switching" of votes. At worst, it kept a small fraction of our supporters away from the polls and brought those of our opponents there in full force.
I must add that I am not suggesting that prognostications, gloomy or otherwise, should necessarily affect our decisions about General Election activities.
•
•
Blessings of Apartheid ...
• By A. P. O'Dowd
No. 3
"LET ME JVST EXPLAIN TO YOU," said Jan. "Tbat house represents the whole of my late father's savings. He paid eighteen hundred pounds for it before the war. It must be worth at least three thousand today. And I've been relying on it all the time. My father told me that I should get it, and that if I wanted to go overseas to specialise, that's where I'd get the money from."
"Yes, I quite understand, Dr. Swart," said the estate agent, "but I've done my best. The house is west of the railway line, and the draft Group Areas plan for Cape Town provides for that whole area to become White. You can't expect any Coloured man to pay three thousand for it. if he may lose it in a few years' time."
"Well, sell it to a White man then. I don't mind."
"Come, Doctor, you're being a little silly now. The whole street is Coloured-always has been. You can't expect to sell to Whites until the Group Areas proclamations are through.
That is, assuming that the area does become White."
"But how long wiII it be before they make up their minds'?"
"Who can say'? I'd advise you to bang on for the present. After all, one can specialise
in this country now, can't oneT' "
